


a balanced exchange

by ravels (orphan_account)



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: Bisexual Sally, Emotional Manipulation, F/F, F/M, Implied Sexual Content, Mother-Son Relationship, Nemesis is not, Sally Jackson Aint Raise No Bitch, Sally and Percy are Black, Sally is an amazing mom, nemesis!percy au, sally centric
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-29
Updated: 2020-05-29
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:07:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24435616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/ravels
Summary: the stranger meets her eyes, and the shifting motion picture that is the stranger’s face freezes. sally sees the void in them: the all-consuming, infinitely deep black that threatens to drown her. “i am nemesis. goddess of vengeance and balance. i see the potential in your future, sally jackson, and the power in your present. you are an incredible woman, like no woman i have ever met. may i stay the night with you?”or, the sally-centric nemesis!percy au no one asked for.
Relationships: Annabeth Chase/Percy Jackson, Percy Jackson & Ethan Nakamura, Percy Jackson & Nemesis, Percy Jackson & Sally Jackson, Sally Jackson/Nemesis
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10





	1. Chapter 1

It is a blisteringly hot night in Montauk and Sally Jackson has just quit her job.

She sits on the dock just down the road from Ralph’s Fish ‘n Chips, still in her uniform— a striped, mint-green apron and skirt, stained with tears and burger grease. She had thrown off the hat in frustration when she quit, releasing her coily hair from its tight knot and over her ears and forehead.

Sally looks out across the water, to where she wishes there were stars, maybe, or a moon to bear witness. Instead, the sky blusters with unpunctured clouds, who seal the muggy, suffocating heat to the earth.

In the distance, she hears laughter. A white Jeep full of cackling college boys pulls into the parking lot at Ralph’s. One of them wears a shirt marked with meaningless Greek letters. Sally sneers under her breath.

Frat boys. Boys like them were why Sally quit.

Ralph had been a terrible manager, but the worst part of the job by far was dealing with the entitled white boys that came in and  _ insisted _ on groping her ass, or tits, or whatever. The Hamptons types— the old, rich white people, and their heirs and heiresses— were tolerable because they pretended she didn’t exist, and they rarely came to Montauk because they had their own private beaches down the way for the most part. The boys, on the other hand, came almost every week during the summer and violated her space without exception.

And she couldn’t report it, either, since Ralph had always acted like she was in risk of losing her job anyway just for being a Black woman in Montauk. She couldn’t risk being perceived as an  _ angry _ Black woman— that’d get her fired, for sure.

So she quit.

Sally rips off the red iron-on patch on her apron that says, “Ralphie’s,” and tosses it into the water. It bobs for a moment, then disappears as the current carries it beneath the dock. 

The ocean is the color of ink in the distance, glimmering with grimness up to the horizon, lapping at her feet with freezing Atlantic water. The sea offers Sally no promises tonight.

Sally reaches into her apron pocket and pulls out a pack of Marlboros. It’s almost empty, save for two cigarettes. There’s also no lighter. She takes out one of the two cigarettes and sighs. Figures she’d need to buy some on a night like tonight.

“Got a cig?”

Sally turns.

Standing next to her on the dock is a stranger, with curly black hair, dark skin, and eyes the color of the ocean— not the ocean on a good day in Montauk, but the ocean  _ now _ , a deep, freezing, indecipherable black. Her face is as unfriendly as it is strange, seeming to blur and shift through various expressions at once.

Sally does a double take— she had definitely not heard the other woman approaching. But she had seen people like her before; mysterious people with strange, shifting faces as well as enormous, menacing creatures masquerading as humans. They had just never actually approached her like this.

“Um. Yeah, but only one,” Sally replies, handing over the pack of Marlboros. “I don’t have a lighter though.”

“Perfect,” says the stranger, taking the last one. “A balanced exchange.” The stranger holds a manicured ring finger to the tip of Sally’s cigarette. Sally blinks. When she opens her eyes, her cigarette is smoldering.

“What brings a woman like you to this part of the world, Sally Jackson?” The stranger asks, savoring her name like cotton candy on her tongue.

Sally blows out her smoke with a soft whistle, deciding not to question how the stranger knows her name. None of the… creatures had ever been able to truly hurt her in the past. “I could ask you the same thing.”

The stranger examines her nails. Her features continue to shift rapidly like a hologram. “Picking strawberries, perhaps?”

Sally chuckles uneasily. Surely lies would be more dangerous than truths to an individual like this? “No. I work here… or at least I used to.”

“Did something happen?” The stranger’s voice is all fake concern, and Sally really doesn’t know what compels her to tell the whole story all over again.

“Hm,” the stranger murmurs, noncommittal. “And what are you going to do about it?”

—

A little later, the opaque clouds have cleared, giving way to a shimmering silver moon. Sally and the stranger stumble onto the street, Sally laughing, her apron torn in places and hands grimy with dust and egg gunk. In the distance, Ralph yells curses, threatening to call the police on them for breaking their window and egging his car.

“I can’t believe we just did that,” says Sally between breathless giggles. The frat boys in the restaurant had been happy to see her at first, then freaked out when she and the stranger had started throwing rocks and eggs. The rush of vengeance was intoxicating like nicotine, but validating and uplifting in every way, like she had always imagined a lover should be. Sally had never felt so  _ alive _ .

Then reality sets in. “Oh, shit. I’m screwed. I should never have—”

“Let’s get out of here,” the stranger— still just a mysterious stranger, but probably one of some supernatural origin, knowing Sally’s luck— interrupts, taking her hand. The stranger’s hand is warm and cold at the same time. “Close your eyes.”

Sally does as she’s told. When she opens them, they are in Sally’s shitty car, on the driveway in front of Sally’s shitty apartment, miles away from Montauk. They are still holding hands, and their bodies are close— close enough for Sally to smell nicotine and woodsmoke on the stranger’s breath.

“Thank you,” Sally says, sincerely, looking the stranger in her indecipherably dark eyes. “You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do that.”

The stranger looks away. “It was my duty.”

Sally ponders that for a moment, silently. “What are you? What do you want from me?”

The stranger meets her eyes, and the shifting motion picture that is the stranger’s face freezes. Sally sees the void in them: the all-consuming, infinitely deep black that threatens to drown her. “I am Nemesis. Goddess of Vengeance and Balance. I see the potential in your future, Sally Jackson, and the power in your present. You are an incredible woman, like no woman I have ever met. May I stay the night with you?”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> it has been six years since that night in montauk and not a day has gone by that sally doesn’t regret it.

It has been six years since that night in Montauk and not a day has gone by that Sally doesn’t regret it.

Perseus— Percy, her son, who is just about to start kindergarten, and of whom she couldn’t be more proud— is sweet, kind, and extraordinarily empathetic for a five year old. He has Sally’s coily hair, her wide nose, and her deep brown skin. He loves to help her in the kitchen, and he loves to listen when she reads books to him before he falls asleep. He is all she has left, and she almost can’t believe that his other mother is Nemesis, the primordial Goddess of Vengeance.

Almost.

It’s his eyes that make the difference— they are black, pure black, unfathomable like the murky sea on that fateful night. They hold an intensity that used to strike fear into Sally’s heart when he was a baby, an intensity that seems to pierce into her very soul.

And yet, when Percy looks at her, his eyes twinkle and shine, bright with the innocence of childhood but also with a genuine _goodness_ that is equally startling. Sally can’t help but feel guilty that she has brought such a terrible fate upon such an innocent, kind little boy.

Sally still doesn’t quite know how being Nemesis’ son will shape her son’s personality. Nemesis had given her a night of freedom at the lowest point in her life, and it had admittedly been incredible. But sometimes Sally fears that if she peers deep into Percy’s eyes, she’ll see an anger simmering beneath his skin, a fundamental anger at the injustices that he sees in the world around him. Percy watches the news with her and has to stomp off to bed when it gets too much for him to handle. He growls— actually growls— at the NYPD when he and Sally go on the Metro. And while it makes Sally proud to see her son with a fully formed, completely instinctive moral compass at only five years old, she wishes it weren’t in a way that could get him hurt.

—

On Percy’s first day of kindergarten, Sally gets called at work and has to go pick him up from school.

She arrives at the local school, still dressed in her Sweet on America uniform, somewhat disbelieving that Percy could already have found trouble in a class where they mostly just finger-painted and read picture books. It seems like a nice school, underfunded and understaffed as it is; Percy’s class numbers in the thirties. The building is dark, grimy brick like all the schools in Manhattan but the inside is at least somewhere near charming, with pastel walls plastered with students’ artwork near the kindergarten. It had seemed like a place where her son could be happy, and that had been enough for Sally.

She could only hope that no monsters had found Percy. That was something Nemesis had mentioned, in their final conversation when Sally was nine months pregnant— that children of the gods often attracted monsters of mythical stature, who would attack them with intent to kill. Nemesis had smiled bitterly when she had said it, assuring Sally that she was “only a minor goddess.”

Sally stops herself before she can think anything more about Nemesis. _Of course_ it would only make her angry to think about the goddess of vengeance.

The principal of the school— a petite woman, brunette, professional— welcomes Sally into her office with a slight smile. She steeples her hands and says, frankly, “Ms. Jackson, your son punched another student in the jaw. The student in question is bleeding, and had to go home.”

Sally… had not been expecting that. “How? He’s only five, and he’s not very big compared to the others, is he?”

The principal— a placard on her desk reads Mrs. Stewart— shrugs. “It puzzled the rest of us as well. I suppose children can do incredible things when they are truly angry.”

That catches Sally’s attention. “What happened? What made him so angry?“

“It doesn’t matter,” Mrs. Stewart replied. “In this school, we teach our students to express their emotions through words, not through actions. Percy will spend a month in detention until he learns that it is unacceptable to enact violence against our peers.”

“But that can’t be fair!” Sally exclaims. “Do you really think he’ll learn that through _detention_? He’s five!”

Mrs. Stewart raises a critical eyebrow. “Do you think _you_ know how to teach children any better than we do?” Mrs. Stewart makes it a point to appraise her slowly, disdainfully, from head to toe. Sally flushes angrily, suddenly hyper aware of her Sweet on America uniform.

“I think I know my son better than you do, yes,” Sally snaps, standing and storming out of the office to go collect her son.

As they walk out of the school building, holding hands, Sally asks, “Percy, honey. What happened that made you get so mad?”

Percy looks up at her, his big, dark eyes bloodshot, then mutters: “Big kid was being mean. Had to be mean back.”

“He was being mean?” Sally repeats, then prepares to go into sympathetic-mom-lesson mode. “Well, Percy, that’s no reason to punch—“

“He bit me,” Percy interrupted. “Look.”

Sally looks. On the back of Percy’s neck are two bite marks, undoubtedly made by the fangs of some impossible creature and definitely not by a normal kindergartener. They look fresh, and ooze red-gold blood. Sally doesn’t know how she didn’t notice them before.

“How did—“

“He hurt me,” Percy whispers. “So I hurt him back. He’s not hurting me again.”


End file.
